joshlanghoff at gmail dot com
Welcome. I’m a church musician, writer, and freelance keyboard player. I’m interested in how performance practice creates and intersects with social significance. (Frank Kogan: “A critic who could convincingly draw a connection between the musical notes and the vomit pill would be a great critic.”) For some reason that means I’ve written a lot about Christian and Mexican acts, and a bit about many other pop and classical genres.
This site compiles my writing on music from faith-based (read: overwhelmingly Protestant Christian) traditions. If you read every piece category by category, in the order suggested by the left sidebar menu — Confessions, Scripture, Sermon, etc. — the work will make what I’m gonna call a liturgical argument toward the construction of a theological aesthetic. If you read the pieces piecemeal, in a different order, g-d bless you; hopefully you’ll still find all the dirty jokes.
The site’s title comes from something Bob Dylan told Newsweek in 1997:
“Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’ — that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”
That’s Dylan. As for me, I have learned innumerable things from preachers and evangelists — from Brueggemann and Cone and Tillich and my own dad, a Lutheran pastor — but just as much of my theology comes from the hymn translations of Catherine Winkworth, the everyday revelations of Amy Grant, the eschatological roars of Sinead O’Connor and Matana Roberts, and my mom’s fastidious organ practicing. As I go about my daily business, I find myself guided by the musical teachings far more often. That’s what this website is about.
Other stuff: I’ve presented six times at the MoPOP (formerly EMP) Pop Conference in Seattle, each time on either faith-based or regional Mexican music. I also operate NorteñoBlog, a website devoted to regional Mexican music. My writing on Mexican and Caribbean music has appeared in Pitchfork, The Village Voice, the Minneapolis City Pages, The Cresset, and The Singles Jukebox, among others. My 2014 article “Karma Comes Back to You Hard,” about the late sierreño singer Ariel Camacho, was Pitchfork’s first article on regional Mexican music. My 2005 Voice article on the duranguense craze, “To the Live Burros,” was that style’s first major overview in English.
Please contact me for more info, and happy reading.
I Believe the Songs 